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November 1, 1997
Technology and Educational Leadership Development: Part Two
by Linda Wing
In the first article, I described why and how doctoral candidates in the Harvard Urban Superintendents Program are expected to acquire and use their technological skills to learn about leadership and to demonstrate and apply the knowledge gained. In this second article I discuss why and how the curriculum in the professional seminar on the urban superintendency, an 11-month-long core course required of all first-year USP students, addresses technology in education. Simply put, our goals are to position our students to have the tools they need to be effective learners in a demanding academic program and to be at the cutting edge of leaders who understand and are able to use technology as a lever for systemically improving teaching and learning.
Curriculum
First-year students in USP complete 12 courses focusing on teaching and learning, law, politics, economics, organizational development, negotiations, adult development, research methodology, and other content and skills considered fundamentally important to insightful and effective educational leadership. At the core of this first-year curriculum is an 11-month-long professional seminar on the urban superintendency. The professional seminar alternates back and forth between case studies of superintendents and specific issues in urban education. One of the issues of focus is the role of technology in enhancing teaching and learning.
There are many leadership challenges and opportunities that currently and potentially promote or constrain the quality of education in urban school districts. No one course, even an 11-month-long professional seminar, can meaningfully address each and every one. Hard choices have to be made regarding the curriculum. This raises the question of why we have decided to include technology in education in the professional seminar. To address this question is also to address the question of why sitting superintendents should pay attention to technology in education. Below I offer a four-part rationale:
1) There is widespread public belief that technology is important to educational improvement. For example, 71 percent of those recently surveyed by the Wall Street Journal/NBC News picked "improve computer equipment and training" as a way to reform education (Hunt, March 14, 1997). Only "better teachers" was selected by a larger proportion (82 percent).
At the local level, broad support for technology in education is exemplified by the host of NetDays that have been and continue to be organized around the country. The NetDay organization estimates that 250,000 volunteers wired 50,000 classrooms in more than 40 states and the District of Columbia in 1996 alone, with March 9, 1996 being the date of the first NetDay.
In the Urban Superintendents Program, we believe that an important consideration in selecting a strategy to improve teaching and learning is the degree to which the leader can marshall community support. A strategy that readily finds strong community support is more likely to take hold in all classrooms in all schools and lead to the desired result than a strategy that parents and other community members find difficult to understand and endorse. Learning with technology appears to be linked in the public's mind with high quality education for children who will be adults in the 21st century.
2) There are a few very promising researcher-teacher collaborations intended to promote constructivist teaching and learning that indicate that technology can be a valuable tool for students. Among these collaborations are those conducted by Marlene Scardamalia at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Barbara White at the University of California at Berkeley. Their partnerships with teachers center on the development and demonstration of inquiry, problem solving, and peer review skills among elementary and middle school children. The children use specially designed technology tools for their learning and work. The most encouraging of the tentative findings emerging from these collaborations is that, while all students appear to benefit, the greatest gains may be experienced by children who were initially the lowest achieving.
In the Urban Superintendents Program, we believe that educational leaders must be devoted to raising the achievement of all children to high standards. We recognize, however, that, on average, certain groups of students, including African Americans, Mexican-origin students, and refugee children from Cambodia, are severely underachieving. Educational leaders are especially obligated to give careful consideration to research-based teaching and learning approaches with the potential to accelerate learning among these children, that is, children who are the least well-served by the current educational system.
3) Teachers who use technology report their work is changed in ways consistent with constructivist teaching and learning. According to a 1990 study by Sheingold and Hadley, teachers stated their use of technology was associated with their developing higher expectations of students and, concomitantly, more often asking students to grapple with complicated curriculum. The teachers indicated as well that technology enabled them to spend more time individualizing instruction and coaching students in small groups.
A 1995 report of Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) described technology-using teachers as expanding their students' access to curricular resources outside the classroom, increasing their students' opportunities to learn through simulations and projects, and assessing their students' work in new ways in order to inform their pedagogy. OTA also identified teachers who employed technology as handling the recording of grades and other management tasks more efficiently, communicating with parents more easily, participating in electronic networks of colleagues, and tapping the knowledge of experts regardless of their location.
In the Urban Superintendents Program, we consider it vital for superintendents to engender and support effective teaching and continuous learning among teachers. There is evidence to suggest that teachers with ready access to technology and well-trained in its use consider technology to be of important assistance as they strive to strengthen their pedagogy and curriculum and to add to their knowledge and skills.
4) Much anecdotal evidence indicates that technology can be used to facilitate and connect the work not only of students and teachers, but also of everyone in a school system, including custodians, budget analysts, food service workers, and principals. We know of no research on the relationship between technology investments and productivity, but our observation of the widespread use of technology in places ranging from auto mechanic shops to hospitals persuades us that technology is an essential tool across a wide spectrum of organizational life in our economy and society in general.
In the Urban Superintendents Program, we think it essential for a superintendent to insure that a school system is indeed a system, a coherent whole with every individual either directly engaged in teaching and learning or actively involved in the support of teaching and learning. Strategies for connecting many individuals in many schools and units into a coherent whole and for enabling high performance throughout the system so that all students can be taught and supported to high levels of achievement need to be in every superintendent's repertoire of knowledge and skills. It seems to us that technology is a tool that can be used to implement such strategies.
In putting forth this four-part rationale, we are mindful that superintendents face considerable obstacles to realizing the potential for teaching and learning to be systemically and continuously improved through the use of technology. We are cognizant of the relatively low proportion of teachers who currently use technology for teaching, much less for teaching to high academic standards (see, for example the 1995 report of the Office of Technology Assessment). We are additionally well aware of the long-term trend in urban students having less access to technology than other students and being held to lower expectations in their use of technology, a phenomenon reported by many sources, including the May 1997 report of the Policy Information Center of the Educational Testing Service. The limited research and professional literature about educational reform efforts in which technology plays a major role is yet another constraint, and there are financial and infrastructure challenges that are formidable as well.
Nonetheless, it is our view that superintendents must look to possibilities and figure out how to realize them if education is ever to be fundamentally changed so that all children will learn to high standards. We certainly do not offer technology in education as a panacea. Yet we believe that the possibilities for the transformation of teaching and learning with the informed use of technology are real and well worth pursuing. A number of developments suggest that this is an optimal time to focus on the pursuit, including:
- the establishment of the e-rate;
- calls for federal support of research such as that made by the March 1997 Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12 Education in the United States;
- heightened attention to the careful chronicling of best practices by schools and school systems with respect to their education technology initiatives;
- and developments such as wireless telecommunications that might eventually ameliorate infrastructure problems.
In the curriculum of the 11-month-long professional seminar on the urban superintendency, we ask our students not to accept as give the four-part rationale put forth above, but to question it. We attempt to look closely at recent research and scrutinize school systems and schools engaged in comprehensive reform that are inclusive of a focus on technology for guiding principles, best practices, and documented benefits to students, teachers, and others. Finally we consider the leadership principles and strategies that we use to weave together the various components of the 11-month curriculum for additions or special emphases that might be required by a superintendent's use of technology as a tool for fundamental reform. In this last regard, the proposition we put forth to our students is this: if they as superintendents of the future are to employ technology to a degree never done before, as an enabler of, and catalyst for, fundamental changes in teaching and learning, then they should seamlessly incorporate what they know and can do with respect to technology into their visions for education, their strategy planning and implementation, and their means of assessing and holding everyone in the system accountable for results for children.
References
Coley, R. J., Cradler, J., and Engel, P. K. (1997, May). Computers and classrooms: The status of technology in U.S. schools, Policy Information Report, Policy Information Center, Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Hunt, A. R. (1997, March 14). "Education becomes top issue, and consensus may emergefor significant change," American Opinion, A Quarterly Survey of Politics, Economics, and Values, The Wall Street Journal, pp. R1, R4.
Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress (1995, April). Teachers and technology: Making the connection (OTA-EHR-616). Washington, DC: GPO.
President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, Panel on Educational Technology (1997, March). Report to the President on the use of technology to strengthen K-12 education in the United States. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President of the United States.
Sheingold, K. and Hadley, M. (1990, September). Accomplished teachers: Integrating computers into classroom practice. New York: Center for Technology in Education, Bank Street College of Education.
E-mail: Linda Wing
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